Moving water at Sydney Uni

Today I am badly stuck with my research. It is a real annoying feeling and of course, it being Sunday, there is no one around to have a good discussion with. I could try my children, and maybe if I can explain the problem to them I might find the solution.

I often have this, if I actually try to explain the problem to someone who is not totally familiar with it, I often find the solution while I am talking. This brings me to the topic of this blog post. I had promised earlier that I would talk more about multidisciplinary research, particularly since my colleague Michael Harris is also steering that way. The point above I just made is probably one of the main reasons why working in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams is good. Rather than talking to your disciplinary friends, you have to explain your research in a much broader context and this throws up all kinds of new questions, but often also provides lots of answers.

Having said that, why am I not more involved in multidisciplinary research? I think this is an issue many of us are struggling with. In fact we all would like to be involved, but it never seems to work that way, and often, if you do get involved in a multidisciplinary project, the project never works out the way you wanted.

This means there are two major barriers towards multidisciplinary work. The first is: how to get involved into a large project with many colleagues from different disciplines, the second (and I think more manageable one) is: How do we make sure we all get something really good out of the project.

The people at IMTA have posted an interesting little blurp on the IMTA website about my visit, and a little video cool! I was very impressed with IMTA, particularly with the super-cool hydraulics lab (see picture below), but also their hydro-climatology group. Definitely a group I am going to keep talking to.

I enjoyed my period in Mexico and arrived back on Sunday at the hottest day in Sydney for a while and the day of the disastrous bushfires in Victoria. I can only extend my condolences to the people of the towns affected. Climate change in claimed to have played a role. Maybe…maybe not. Clearly, it was exceptionally hot and exceptionally dry in this period and that is not helpful. But is this climate variability or climate change?

And yes I missed a post last week. I was just a bit too tired and there are too many things going on. Australian Research Council grants (ARC) are due in two weeks, teaching will start again in 3 weeks and I am trying to finish and work on what I have learned in Mexico. So this is maybe a bit scattered post and not very coherent. Next time maybe better.

It is still Sunday for me, even though in Australia it is well into the afternoon. I am back in Mexico: ¡Ola! I’ll stop there, my spoken Spanish is definitely not up to scratch. But I can read Spanish and I am getting better at it. So I picked up a story in the newspaper this morning about the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, held a speech. The interesting thing is that the Secretary of the UNFCCC Mr Yvo de Boer called Mexico one of the leading countries in the climate change area. This is because Mexico has set a target of a 50% reduction of emissions by 2050. In contrast, Australia is still planning to reduce its levels by 5 – 15% by 2020. The date is earlier, but the target is substantially lower.